Hello World

Developing on the BitTorrent Sync API? Aaron Liao is on board to work with you.

I remember my first experience with the BitTorrent 1.0 client in 2001 and how it completely changed the way I downloaded large files in university. Fast forward 13 years and not only has BitTorrent as a protocol come a long way, the company has as well. Just over a year ago, BitTorrent rolled out Sync – a decentralized approach to synchronized storage. Later that year, we made the API available to developers and the world over started building awesome decentralized services like SyncNet. Sync has had great momentum with both end users and developers and now that I’ve been at BitTorrent for 60 days, I figured it’s time to say:

Hello World – I’m Aaron Liao and I’m the new Developer Evangelist for Sync.

Prior to joining BitTorrent, I spent 6 years at Microsoft working on a variety of things like Windows Home Server and Enterprise Technical Strategy and before that, I taught Object Oriented Programming. I’m elated to be at BitTorrent because I believe the Internet is at an interesting juncture; as things like cloud storage and services become increasingly convenient, many of us knowingly or unknowingly give up varying amounts of security and privacy, and these sacrifices are now coming to light in the form of data leaks, snooping, etc. When I first demoed what I called “private cloud” with Windows Home Server in 2008, I was surprised that the majority of the people I spoke with weren’t more concerned with the privacy of their data. Things have since changed and it’s an exciting time to work on decentralized storage and a better, people-powered Internet =]

In future blog posts, I plan to cover fun things like demystifying the Sync Secret, how trackers work, and also highlighting some great projects that the Sync developer community is working on. I’d love to hear from you about what topics you’d find interesting and helpful for developing on the Sync API. In addition, if you’ve built something cool on the API, I want to hear about it! Send me an email (aaron [at] bittorrent [dot] com) or a tweet (@aaronliao)! I’m looking forward to talking with as many of you as I can and meeting some of you (I attend events like DEFCON, Toorcon, and a variety of others) – please say hello if you run into me and let me know if I can help in any way.